Lecture I

Film Analysis

Film is often seen as a form of communication, in which case the question of how films communicate becomes significant.

Communication theory holds that there is a message which is sent by a Sender and a Receiver. Since there is no the message must be coded into something and then sent. The nature of the code is important. In speech it is generally languages.

SENDER========message=======>Receiver

(encoded) |

For communication to occur the receiver must be able to “decode” the message.

When people speak to one another in a language they both understand the words and underlying grammatical structure constitute the code (at least a major part). When a film maker (sender) creates a film, the film is coded and sends it to the audience members (receiver) who need to understand the code.

The basic analytical point is how do we break the code to understand the film?

There are three kinds of arts often discussed: (a) graphic (2 dimensional like painting (b) plastic (3 dimensional like sculpture and (c) performing (which adds a dimension of time, but is the art form in which the created work of art does not get sent directly from the creative artist to the receiver, but instead, generally must pass through an interpretive artist or performer. When a person looks are a painting the person sees what the artist did, but when one sees a play, one sees how a specific group of people interpreted the play. Hence different interpretations are possible with performing arts which are not in the graphic and plastic arts.

The film arts are more complicated since they involve all the creative and interpretive aspects of theater and add to this the elements of movie making – cinematography, editing and so on. It is hard if not impossible to assign a single creative artist to film, although the director usually has the final say on the end product (although the producers may have a hand in it as well since they often control the editing).

Films usually start with an idea which the screen writer organizes into a script. (It may be that the script is based on a novel or a play or a short story, or it may be an original idea). This idea is turned into a script ultimately and a director begins to bring together all the aspects of films making artistically making a unified whole (hopefully). Working with cinematographers, sets designers, lighting designers, sound designers, costume designers, editors and a whole host of others, the director makes sure (or tries to) that all of these people share some idea of what the final product is to be so that the pieces are in harmony with one another. The film when finished must stand on its own. The audience should not have to go outside the film (go read the original book) to have the film work. Not that looking at the source material and the film is uninteresting or uninformative, but it is not a requirement for understanding the film.

Very often, the story will have both a text and a subtext (or a plot and a theme). The text is the story line. It is what people tell their friends the film is about. The subtext generally has a more complex philosophical meaning. In some films this is striking and in others virtually missing. (Perhaps there should be a distinction made in films like that in writing where fiction is distinguished from literature!).

The message of the subtext is often heavily coded and the process of deciphering the code in a text is called hermeneutics. Cryptanalysis which involves the breaking of codes and ciphers is something different. In 2001: A Space Odyssey the computer’s name is HAL. If you raise each letter one HAL => IBM. No cryptographer would agree that this is in any way provable. However hermeneutically it can be argued from the rest of the film, that this is likely to be the case.

There are dofferemt kinds of analysis as well, structural analysis. content analysis, and so on. Structureal analysis looks at the basic organization of the material and uses that organization to help arrive and some conclusions about the work. An example of this can be seen in the assigned Eleanor Rigby paper

ANALYSIS OF KING KONG